Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Core-Animated-Pages for Slide Transitions in Polymer

I get a good feeling from Material Design's attention to animation. It is not just that it includes animation or focuses on animation. What I like is the thoughtful expression of how animation should support the user experience with an app.

Of course, I have no idea how to implement the ideas in Material. Well, I have some idea, but it would require so much JavaScript (or Dart) coding that I am quite certain that I would add one nice animation touch to my app and then let the rest go to pot.

As luck would have it, I have a Polymer and Paper implementation of a new <x-pizza> element that is in need of animation improvement:

The paper materials in this example are the tabs (paper-tabs). Clicking on them makes a nice radial animation on the tab and then animates the selected tab indicator. But the tab content, currently done with <core-pages>, has no such transition. In fact, since the content of each tab is the same (a list of possible toppings to add), it looks as if nothing happens at all.

There does not seem to be anything in Paper that is going to remedy this situation. But I note that <core-pages> is not the only game in Core element town. Indeed, there is tantalizingly named core-animated-pages. The name alone suggests that it does the same thing as the functional, but uninspiring <core-pages> tag.

With that, I get nothing. The page transition is still just as boring and non-supportive of the user experience as before.

It turns out that, in order to use transitions, you have to import them. So let me back up to the point after which I installed from Bower. After doing so, I change <core-pages> to <core-animated-pages>and I add the corresponding transition import to the top of my element:

With that, choosing a tab still changes the selected page, but now the page slides in from the right:

I'm not 100% sure that this is the correct Material direction. I clicked on the middle tab when the first tab was active, so I clicked on the tab to the right. Doing so, the page content came from the right, which seems proper.

Regardless, it is interesting to note that, if I click on a tab to the left of the currently active tab, then the animations move in the opposite direction:

Even though the name of the transition is slide-from-right, it takes into account the document order of the elements being transitioned. This makes for a consistent experience with very little effort.

I experiment with other transitions, but most do no apply well to the current layout. Those that work require a little more effort on my part than the slide-from-right transition.

I think tomorrow I will explore some of these other transitions out of the confines of tabs. There may be some even nicer ways to chose pizza toppings thanks to Paper.